There is an industry wide effort underway to replace historically and culturally loaded terms like master/slave with neutral alternatives. The IEEE 1588 committee will most likely amend the standard, but so far no consensus on the new terminology has been reached.
Most of the proposed alternative terms are, IMHO, either awful sounding or just plain silly. There is a window of opportunity for this project to take the lead in recommending terminology that is, at the same time, both culturally neutral and technically more accurate. The original designation of the PTP port roles made little sense in the first place. Under the institution of slavery, the role of a slave is to perform work for the master. In a PTP network it is the "master" port that serves the slaves, the opposite of what the terms suggest. The information flowing through a PTP network may best be described as a time signal. As any EE will tell you, a signal flows from its source to one or more sinks. Thus we can trace the time signal in a PTP network as it flows from a given time source to a time sink. The approach I'm considering is to start today with the human readable program help, after that the man pages, and later on the identifiers in the program. With very few exceptions, none of the re-naming would impact any existing user configuration scripts. We will take care not to cause issues for the myriad deployments of this software world wide. Thanks, Richard Richard Cochran (1): Convert usage messages to time source/sink terminology. phc2sys.c | 10 +++++----- ptp4l.c | 2 +- 2 files changed, 6 insertions(+), 6 deletions(-) -- 2.20.1 _______________________________________________ Linuxptp-devel mailing list Linuxptp-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/linuxptp-devel
